Analytical Evidence of Nonlinearity in Qubits and Continuous-Variable Quantum Reservoir Computing

The natural dynamics of complex networks can be harnessed for information processing purposes. A paradigmatic example are artificial neural networks used for machine learning. In this context, quantum reservoir computing (QRC) constitutes a natural extension of the use of classical recurrent neural networks using quantum resources for temporal information processing. Here, we explore the fundamental properties of QRC systems based on qubits and continuous variables. We provide analytical results that illustrate how nonlinearity enters the input–output map in these QRC implementations. We find that the input encoding through state initialization can serve to control the type of nonlinearity as well as the dependence on the history of the input sequences to be processed.